One Year After Harvey, Houston Awaits The Next Flood

This storywas produced and originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of theClimate Deskcollaboration.

Darlene Wilkens’ branch of Spartan Insurance had flooded before, but never like this. A year ago, as she watched horrifying coverage of Hurricane Harvey from home, she realized her office in Meyerland, a low-lying part of Houston that seems to always get hit, was probably already ruined.

Wilkens, the branch manager, drove to her office a week later to find her refrigerator lying sideways in a backroom. Her file cabinets were full of “nasty” water. “It was pretty much total chaos,” she says. She lost everything except computers and some important files she’d stored high off the ground.

For three months, she worked from her house in northwest Houston where things were drier, trying to run the office remotely. She had tons of work. “There were lots of claims being called in,” she says.

As annoying and scary as Harvey was, she considers herself lucky: “It wasn’t that bad compared to people who keep losing their homes.”

In Houston, losing one’s home is becoming an all too familiar experience. Harvey dumped up to 51 inches of rain on the city during half a week, inundating more than 100,000 homes in what was the worst rainfall event in U.S. history. Then this past July 4th, 8 inches of rain fell on Houston, swamping streets, stranding unlucky motorists, and nixing the city’s Fourth of July party. By local standards, it was just a summer rainstorm.

On a Wednesday in early August, it is pouring again. Wilkens cracks open her office door and eyes the rain anxiously. “Hopefully we don’t flood,” she says.

AFP Contributor via Getty Images

Chances are there will be flooding — if not at her office, at some other unlucky soul’s house or business nearby. Meyerland, an upper-middle class neighborhood along Brays Bayou in inner southwest Houston, is almost entirely in the 100-year flood plain. Technically, that means it is supposed to have a 1 percent chance of flooding each year. Those numbers might sound reassuring, but recent history suggests they are not.

Houston has had at least three property-wrecking floods in the past four years. Of course, there was Harvey. The other two, in 2015 and 2016, weren’t storms severe enough to have a category assigned to them — but they also engulfed homes and businesses in low-lying Meyerland.

People here are already living the reality that communities across the country, from fire-prone neighborhoods in California to low-lying subdivisions in coastal Florida, are also facing. Not long ago, Meyerland’s 1-percent-per-year chance of flooding felt like a remote possibility. Now, as climate change ramps up storms and raises the waterline, this vulnerable neighborhood seems increasingly at risk. Mitigation projects like the ones funded by a $2.5 billion bond, expected to pass on Saturday, the one-year anniversary of Harvey’s arrival in Houston, may not be able to keep pace.

In response to the new reality, some people are leaving the neighborhood. The average home price has dropped from $395,000 in July 2017 to $347,000 a year later, according to real-estate website Zillow. Similar but less flood-prone neighborhoods haven’t seen the same drop.

But the reality is that Meyerland is still a great place to live. It’s cozy, affluent, and conveniently located, a short drive from Chinatown, Downtown, and the Museum District. So many people, like the majority of the business owners and workers in this Meyerland strip mall, are staying put.

Those holding on seem increasingly resigned to a future of incessant flooding, and they have learned to rely on their own inventions and workarounds rather than waiting for the city and Harris County to bail them out. Wilkens and her fellow businesspeople live in a dual reality: With no guarantee of a drier future, these owners and employees are trying to stay optimistic — while also preparing to…

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